Interpretive Claims Research Articles

Localising human rights law: a case study of civil society interpretation of rights in Scotland

ABSTRACTLiterature, most notably in anthropology and international law, has explored experiences and contributions of local-level actors in efforts to realise international human rights. This article contributes a new and complementary perspective to one aspect of this scholarship, on the localisation of international rights language. It focuses on the localisation of legal language in a European context. It explores claims by civil society actors about the applicability of legal human rights standards, drawing upon data generated during the participative mapping process that underpinned Scotland's first National Human Rights Action Plan. The article provides a qualitative case study of engagements with three particular rights – the right to life, the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right to respect for private and family life. It finds significant evidence of civil society actors using the language of human rights law to anchor interpretive claims about how the rights should apply, in a way that is prescribed, but not defined by, authoritative institutional interpretations. The case study reveals how interpretive engagement with human rights law corresponds to a sense of entitlement to use the language of international human rights. It thereby contributes to a richer understanding of the drivers of, and risks to, local-level ownership of human rights language, highlighting insights for both scholarship and human rights advocacy.

Kant’s Account of Cognition

In this paper, we offer an overview of the basic structure of Kant’s account of cognition, of the conditions on the notion of cognition most central to the first Critique, and how they are satisfied in the case of human beings. Our primary aim in this regard is to provide a comprehensive (albeit not exhaustive) framework for understanding Kant’s account of (theoretical) cognition. In the course of doing so, we argue for various interpretative claims, which, taken together, amount to a novel understanding of Kant’s account of cognition. First, we argue that cognition is a mental state that determines a given object by attributing general features to it. Second, we explain what it means for Kant for an object to be given: givenness in the relevant sense involves an immediate relation to an existing object. These first two claims imply that cognition (Erkenntnis) is distinct from knowledge (Wissen), both in Kant’s sense and in our modern sense. Third, we note some fundamental ambiguities about what sensibility and understanding are, and point out that purely causal interpretations of these faculties are problematic. Fourth, we distinguish between an intuition and an intuitive representation (analogous to the distinction between a concept and a discursive representation) in such a way that an intuition is one specific kind of intuitive representation. Fifth, we describe two different accounts of concepts (‘logical’ and ‘psychological’) and explain how they complement each other (despite their distinctness). Sixth, we diagnose several confusions regarding whether Kant is or is not a non-conceptualist about intuitions (though without attempting a definitive resolution to that debate). Finally, we show how our analysis of cognition clarifies what the most promising lines of argument are for Kant’s claim that we cannot have cognition of the objects of traditional metaphysics (while still allowing for limited kinds of knowledge of things in themselves).

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940–1944 by Sarah Gensburger

Reviewed by: Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940–1944 by Sarah Gensburger Michael E. O’Sullivan Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940–1944. By Sarah Gensburger. Translated by Jonathan Hensher with the collaboration of Elisabeth Fourmont. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 216. Paper $35.00. ISBN 978-0253017444. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews artfully examines an album of photographs taken by Germans plundering the property of French Jews. The album was arranged by Allied occupation forces after the war and preserved by the Federal Archives in Koblenz. These pictures document Operation Furniture (Möbel Aktion), the institutionalized robbery of French Jews, directed first by Alfred Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and then by Colonel Kurt von Behr’s Dienststelle West (of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) from 1942 to 1944. This evidence, likely compiled originally by Rosenberg and von Behr as proof of their productivity, showcases the massive theft of everything from valuable art to the kitchenware, radios, light bulbs, and mattresses from 38,000 homes “abandoned” by Parisian Jews during [End Page 225] the height of their incarceration and deportation. In presenting us with this material, Sarah Gensburger blends analysis of historical photographs with an impressive collection of survivor testimony and displays a sweeping familiarity with both the documentary evidence and historiographical context of Germany’s pillage of Jewish assets during the Holocaust. This book’s most meaningful scholarly intervention is to revise academic work privileging the economic utility of the Holocaust. In opposition especially to Götz Aly’s controversial Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2005), Gensburger interprets these photos as proof that Operation Furniture and other forms of mass pillage never benefitted the Third Reich materially. Rather, systematic looting belonged to the larger process of complete annihilation, eliminating the physical traces of Nazi victims by transforming personal possessions into goods that were frequently destroyed due to their shabby condition and lack of functionality. Instead of propping up the economy of everyday Germans during the war, the ransacking of all Jewish possessions resulted from the overwhelming ideological urge to destroy every remnant of European Jewry. Gensburger supports her interpretative claim in part by critiquing the ways in which textual historians of the Holocaust use archival images. Pointing out mistakes by well-known historians like Martin Dean in Robbing the Jews (2008) and others, she does much more than highlight the errors of colleagues. In one case, she shows how Aly mislabeled photos from the album under review: his captions misrepresented images of packed crates of art as material goods intended for transport to the civilian population of Germany. In this manner, she directly weakens his assertions of a strong economic dimension to the genocide (64–65). Gensburger also strengthens the book’s central point by contextualizing each photo. In one example, she identifies the illusory nature of an image of interned seamstresses turning stolen garments into skirts for German girls of the Reich. She quotes former inmate Erna Herzberg, who suggested that almost no skirts were ever actually produced. Herzberg and others only reused fabric for occasional items made to order by National Socialist elites. What appears to be evidence of targeted plunder was actually a photo staged by von Behr or Rosenberg so that they could maintain autonomy over their economically unproductive action and retain laborers who fulfilled their personal requests (106–107). Such layered analysis unveils the complexity of using photographs as primary sources, illustrating the rigorous scrutiny that such analysis requires. The depiction of Jewish victims frequently excluded from historical narratives constitutes another intriguing element of this book. Gensburger fills a “memory hole” that devalues the Jewish spouses of gentiles and so-called Mischlinge that inhabited the internment camps of Paris and whose conditions were more tolerable than most forced labor facilities. As comparably fortunate Jews who largely escaped both deportation to Auschwitz and the horrors of the notorious Drancy concentration camp, internees at camps like Levitan, Austerlitz, and Bassano formed the primary labor force of Operation Furniture. The gaze of National Socialist photographers frequently [End Page 226] relegated these prisoners to the margins of the images, making plundered goods the...

Form Without Matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on Color Perception by Mark Eli Kalderon

Reviewed by: Form Without Matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on Color Perception by Mark Eli Kalderon Gregory Salmieri Mark Eli Kalderon. Form Without Matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on Color Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 216. Cloth, $75.00. Kalderon describes his book as "an essay in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography" (vii). It is an example of what has sometimes been called 'philosophical scholarship' or 'philosophical exegesis'—that is, scholarship on a historical thinker that is intended to bring to light a view of enduring philosophical significance and to commend it to the attention of contemporary philosophers working on the relevant issues. This is an especially challenging genre, and I do not think that Kalderon navigates it successfully, but he has nonetheless produced a book of great value to students of Aristotle's theory of perception—especially students who are also interested in contemporary work on perception. Philosophers of perception who do not have a strong antecedent interest in Aristotle will find material of value as well, but this material may not be prevalent or prominent enough in the book to sustain their interest. The first two chapters develop the puzzle of how to reconcile the idea that the objects of vision are at a distance from the perceiver with the idea that perception involves contact between the sense organ and its object. Kalderon attributes this puzzle to Empedocles, who he thinks attempted to reconcile the two ideas by identifying color as an effluence that proceeds from the distant object into the eye. Having been "ingested" thusly by the perceiver, the distant object's color can be present in awareness. Plato attempted a somewhat different reconciliation, and a host of philosophers attempted to resolve the puzzle by denying (in one way or another) that perception is an awareness of distant objects. (Kalderon mentions Parmenides, Melissus, Democritus, and Protagoras as ancient thinkers who took this tack, and he names Berkeley as a modern exponent; I take it that the entire representationalist tradition falls within this camp as well.) The remaining seven chapters describe how Aristotle resolves the puzzle by denying that perception involves literal contact between organ and object, but respecting the facts that make the metaphors of contact and ingestion apt. Kalderon's Aristotle rejects as a category error the view that color can travel or touch things, but he holds that "in seeing, we take in the scene before us by assimilating the chromatic form of the particulars arrayed in the scene, by our experience being constitutively shaped by their color" (191). Thus, in perception, the external world is present to the mind in a way that would be impossible if perception were a mere effect of external objects. The presence is due to a physical process in which the distant object affects a medium and sense organs made of that medium, without literally traveling through them into the perceiver. This theory, which is most fully stated in the book's final chapter, is developed gradually through a series of discussions of knotty passages (mostly) from De Anima 2 and De Sensu. Kalderon's interpretations of these texts are plausible, and his commentary is often insightful—particularly as regards why positions that strike modern readers as absurd would have seemed compelling to Aristotle, and how (sometimes non-obvious) variants of these positions might be defensible in a contemporary context. I found the discussion of the view that "the chromatic hues result from the proportion or ratio of light and dark" (110) especially helpful in this respect. [End Page 343] Concise discussions of prominent competing interpretations make the book a good point of entry to the secondary literature on the relevant Aristotelian chapters. However, these discussions are often too brief to enable the reader to assess Kalderon's interpretation. More importantly, little is said about the significance of each of his interpretive claims to the book's argument. This does not diminish the book's value as a commentary on specific passages, but it makes it hard to read as an "essay in the philosophy of perception." It is difficult to tell digressions from essential content, and readers who are unconvinced of Kalderon...

The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen

Reviewed by: The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen Carrie Griffin (bio) Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, editors. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 94. Cambridge UP, 2015. 302pp. £67.00. In their prefatory remarks, the editors of this timely volume, Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, highlight the tendency among many medieval book historians to produce “tightly focused analyses of individual manuscripts or small groups of codices” (1), citing James Simpson’s critique that palaeographers and codicologists fail to translate their findings into “literary criticism and cultural history.” The collection they mastermind—The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches—successfully marks a move away from such tightly focused studies toward a reappraisal of manuscripts as “objects within the cultural world, where people interact with them in meaningful, readable ways” (2). The essays ask broad questions about book culture in later medieval Europe but significantly they are underpinned by those aspects of traditional manuscript studies, and this is the strength of the collection: there are no single case studies, and instead scholars use their intimate knowledge of manuscript production and use to make “broader interpretive claims about manuscript culture” (12). It is this philosophy (not a new idea, as acknowledged by the editors, but applied to medieval studies in pockets only) that drives the collection, informing the thirteen contributions and challenging, “gauntlet-like” the “entire field of medieval literary studies” (Kerby-Fulton 243). The essays gathered here are consistently strong, privileging theoretical assessments of questions around matters such as authorship, the manuscript-print nexus, circulation, archival practices, and miscellaneity, while (necessarily) retaining a strong foundation in close readings of the book; as such they are both provocative and informative. Some of the contributions suggest ways in which we might refocus our treatment of and relationship with the medieval book. Seth Lerer’s essay opens by looking at the complex relationship between manuscript and printed books, asserting that manuscripts were designed to be unique but that early printed books, for all their indebtedness to the manuscript, were never meant to pass as manuscripts. “Bibliographical theory and the textuality of the codex: towards a history of the premodern book” (17–33) argues that early printed books and manuscripts did not exist simply to transmit authorial content but instead were [End Page 556] “shaped by the commercial, scribal, and social institutions of the time” (18). Lerer’s piece looks at how the medieval impulse to compile “shades into” compilation practices evident in early printed books, specifically in Sammelbände (19), examining also the various ways in which early printed books could be and indeed were transformed into unique objects. In “What is manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix” (34–59), Stephen G. Nichols suggests that we are too dependent, despite our technological sophistication, on “analog protocols developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (34) with respect to our attitudes to medieval manuscripts. He suggests that we can profitably consider them a “technology,” produced in “urban micro-cultures” requiring high levels of skill and interpretative acts that are visible on each page, rather than as irregular, artisanal, and idiosyncratic objects that require to be replaced by critical editions. “Manuscripts,” Nichols argues, “situate their texts in contemporary history” (36). Jeffrey Todd Knight’s “Organising manuscript and print: from compilatio compilation” (77–95) also studies a Sammelband, here in order to think through “the complex entanglement of print and manuscript . . . in the reading and writing cultures of late pre-modern England” (77). Several of the essays offer thought-provoking reassessments of commonly debated issues and cruxes in the field medieval book history. Erik Kwakkel, in “Decoding the material book: cultural residue in medieval manuscripts” (60–76), is concerned with the kind of information that can be gleaned from the codex itself apart from in the words: the “data embedded in the physicality of the object itself” (60). His essay examines what looking beyond the textual content might teach us about the scribe, the relationship between that scribe and the reader, and the anticipated use for the volume, concluding that “book design may relate manuscripts to their milieu of production, readers, and manner of use...

Revolution as restoration or foundation? Frantz Fanon’s politics of world building

This article claims that the political theory of Martinican-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon offers important resources for working through current problems in democratic theory. Political theorists investigating questions of revolution often place paradoxes of constituent and constituted power at the center of their research. Fanon, on the other hand, interrogates whether the proper object of revolution is the restoration of a prior form of life or the foundation of a new political world. Arguing against the tendency to bifurcate Fanon’s work into discontinuous stages, I advance the claim that worldliness operates as the central concept that establishes the continuity of Fanon’s oeuvre and that anchors his conception of colonization. This interpretive claim is crucial since Fanon’s theorization of colonialism as worldlessness authorizes his ultimate rejection of negritude as a politics of restoration and his embrace of revolution as a foundational project of world building.

Interpretive reflexivity in ethnography

Many would argue that ethnographic knowledge claims are partial. Many say this predicament demands the researcher’s self-reflexivity about ethnographic claims. Commonly, ethnographers perform reflexivity by discussing how their research may reflect interests or biases that accompany their positions in hierarchies of domination. Positional reflexivity uneasily straddles a realism that claims to know which position(s) affected the research, and a normativism that aims to demystify what we claim to know. Both stances suppress the interpretive work that researchers and researched constantly are doing. In a more interpretive practice of reflexivity, ethnographers explore how they figured out other people’s meanings in the field, instead of focusing on correlations between their claims and their social position. Interpretive reflexivity considers social positions within ongoing circuits of communication between researcher and researched. Since interpretations are part of explanation in much ethnography, interpretive reflexivity widens our ability to assess causal as well as interpretive claims.

Teaching Real Data Interpretation with Models (TRIM): Analysis of Student Dialogue in a Large-Enrollment Cell and Developmental Biology Course

We present our design for a cell biology course to integrate content with scientific practices, specifically data interpretation and model-based reasoning. A 2-yr research project within this course allowed us to understand how students interpret authentic biological data in this setting. Through analysis of written work, we measured the extent to which students' data interpretations were valid and/or generative. By analyzing small-group audio recordings during in-class activities, we demonstrated how students used instructor-provided models to build and refine data interpretations. Often, students used models to broaden the scope of data interpretations, tying conclusions to a biological significance. Coding analysis revealed several strategies and challenges that were common among students in this collaborative setting. Spontaneous argumentation was present in 82% of transcripts, suggesting that data interpretation using models may be a way to elicit this important disciplinary practice. Argumentation dialogue included frequent co-construction of claims backed by evidence from data. Other common strategies included collaborative decoding of data representations and noticing data patterns before making interpretive claims. Focusing on irrelevant data patterns was the most common challenge. Our findings provide evidence to support the feasibility of supporting students' data-interpretation skills within a large lecture course.

Secondary Interpretation of CT Examinations: Frequency and Payment in the Medicare Fee-for-Service Population

PurposeSecondary interpretation of diagnostic imaging examinations (providing a second formal interpretation for imaging performed at another institution) may reduce repeat imaging after transfer of care. Recently, CMS requested information to guide payment policy. We aimed to study historic trends in submitted claims and payments for secondary interpretation services in the Medicare fee-for-service population. MethodsApplying current procedural terminology codes by body part to Medicare Part B aggregate claims files, we identified all CT interpretation services rendered between 1999 and 2012. Secondary interpretation services were identified using combined code modifiers 26 and 77, in accordance with CMS billing guidelines. The frequencies of billed and denied services were extracted for primary and secondary CT interpretation services. Primary versus secondary interpretation denial rates were calculated and compared. ResultsOf all 227 million Medicare Part B claims for CT services, 299,468 (0.13%) were for secondary interpretation services. From 1999 to 2012, growth in secondary interpretation claims outpaced that in primary interpretation claims (+811% versus +56%; compound annual growth rate 17% versus 3.2%). As a percentage of all services, secondary interpretations increased from 0.05% in 1999 to 0.30% in 2012. Denial rates for second interpretations decreased from 1999 to 2012 (12.7% to 7.0%), and now approach those for primary interpretations (5.4% in 2012). ConclusionsMedicare claims for secondary interpretation of CT examinations are growing but account for less than 1% of all billed CT interpretation services. Denial rates are similar to those of primary interpretation services.

Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon by Jessica M. Parr

Reviewed by: Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon by Jessica M. Parr William Taylor Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon. By Jessica M. Parr. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Pp. [viii], 235. $60.00, ISBN 978-1-62846-198-5.) With her debut work, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon, Jessica M. Parr offers a compelling contribution to a well-researched field that includes Thomas S. Kidd’s notable recent study, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven, 2014). It is understandable, then, that some of Parr’s broader conclusions about Whitefield as a transatlantic personality feel more well-worn than they might have otherwise. Nevertheless, Parr’s unique analytical perspective and her tight interpretative focus on Whitefield’s image allow her to make a significant contribution to the growing literature on the man and his world. Skillfully employing a variety of sources, including diaries, letters, poems, sermons, newspapers, and memorial logbooks, Parr soundly argues that George Whitefield should be seen as the key figure who unified and shaped the unwieldy Anglo-American evangelical Christianity that emerged from the Great Awakening and extended into at least the nineteenth century. Central to her argument is the unique use of the concept of a religious icon as an analytical tool. To this end, Parr relies heavily on the definition of an icon expressed by the early Christian theologian St. John of Damascus. This iconic perspective reveals that “[i]t is no accident that evangelical Christianity took off in the British Atlantic around 1739, just as Whitefield’s missionary career took off. Whitefield embodied a religious culture that he helped to shape and promote” (p. 7). The process of making or “inventing” Whitefield into “a model by which a diverse group of observers could find spiritual fulfillment in an emerging, diverse, and nebulous religious culture” was not uncontested, and there were multiple contributors (p. 7). Whitefield himself used print as his preferred medium to carefully construct his transatlantic image as a reforming Anglican revivalist who emphasized the New Birth and religious toleration and who could be readily accepted by Protestants from every denomination. But he was not alone. Both during and after his life there were others who worked to shape Whitefield as an icon, such as John and Charles Wesley, Selina the Countess of Huntingdon, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Whitaker, Anthony Benezet, Olaudah Equiano, and John Marrant. They co-opted his memory for their own varied purposes, which ranged from pro- and antirevivalism, to pro- and antislavery efforts, to support for the American Revolution. Throughout, Parr clearly and persuasively makes her case, and she succeeds in this effort by focusing closely on her main interpretative claim. This limited scope is seen, among other places, in the narrow endnotes and the lack of tangential historiographical digressions. The result is a book that is refreshingly straightforward and accessible. Unfortunately, the book’s few difficulties also stem from this approach. For instance, Parr primarily focuses on Whitefield and his image during the 1730s, the 1740s, and the period after his death [End Page 658] in 1770. The wealth of evidence available for these years helps explain this emphasis, but the strategy leaves the 1750s and 1760s largely overlooked. Another curious oversight can be found in the treatment of Whitefield’s wife, Elizabeth. She is never mentioned by name, and when she is briefly addressed it is on the occasion of her death. While the book’s single-minded and carefully limited focus is generally a benefit, these few instances reveal a need to read Inventing George Whitefield alongside a more thorough account of Whitefield’s life. In the end, though, this should not seriously detract from Parr’s convincing argument regarding the significance of George Whitefield’s iconic image in shaping Anglo-American evangelical Christianity from the First Great Awakening through the Second Great Awakening and beyond. William Taylor Alabama State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Developing Symbolic Interpretation Through Literary Argumentation

Literature can be a powerful resource for adolescents’ psychosocial development, as it provides opportunities to experience the world through the perspectives of others and juxtapose these with one’s own experiences. However, gaining access to these perspectives requires going beyond literal words on the page to explore interpretive meanings. This mixed-methods case study addresses the need to better understand how adolescent students learn to interpret literary works. Specifically, 9th-grade students participated in a 5-week instructional module focused on symbolic interpretation and coming of age themes in texts with a variety of sources of complexity. The primary data sources were an intentional sample of classroom discussions and essays written before and after instruction. Analyses indicate that students learned to make interpretive claims around symbolism. Textual evidence to support these claims was evident in whole-class discussions but less so in the written essays. Students also struggled to reason about why evidence supported particular claims and how the interpretive claims were related to understanding the characters and their worlds. Discussion focuses on the value of symbolic interpretation as a starting point for engaging adolescents in interpretive practices but notes that developing facility with literary interpretation takes concerted effort over longer periods of time.

Sobre interpretaciones posibles del derecho y de los textos de Enrique P. Haba

Juan Antonio García Amado y Enrique P. Haba debaten sobre la objetividad de la interpretación en un intercambio epistolar. Su debate se publica en los dos siguientes artículos. En el primero García Amado defiende una objetividad interpretativa negativa de acuerdo con la cual aunque no se puede sostener que exista una única interpretación correcta, sí puede afirmarse que existen interpretaciones imposibles.

Erratum to: On the “Virtue Turn” and the Problem of Categorizing Chinese Thought

57 As before (p. 342), a number of virtue ethical interpreters have been fairly modest and focused in their discussion of the issues, carefully delineating the scope of their interpretive claims, so no blanket condemnation is intended here. On the other hand, I think that for those steeped in the virtue ethics literature (myself included), there remains a hazard of losing sight of how their discussions can seem to others who are not steeped in that literature and do not appreciate its complexities. Of course, the critics have responsibility not to misread the virtue ethical interpreters of Chinese thought, but the interpreters can and should also take steps to try to forestall misunderstandings.

The Use of Usus and the Function of Functio : Teleology and Its Limits in Descartes’s Physiology

Descartes rejects appeals to final causes in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, he employs the apparently teleological language of ‘ functio ’ and ‘ usus ’ in his physiology. I examine this interpretive problem by turning our attention especially to the explanatory structures Descartes uses and the medical context of his physiology. I employ analyses of ‘function’ in philosophy of biology to clarify my interpretive claims. Descartes primarily employs ‘ usus ’ and ‘ functio ’ to provide “function-analytical” explanations of the complex behavior of living things—a familiar project present also in the work of physician Jean Fernel. Here usus are treated like “Cummins-functions.” However, Descartes occasionally employs final causal explanations like those in the work of anatomists Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente and William Harvey. Here usus are treated like “Wright-functions.” Examples include Descartes’s explanations of the bicuspid mitral valve in the heart and of the psycho-corporeal physiology of sensation. This kind of explanation is problematic. Descartes’s explicit strategy for grounding such explanations in divine non-deceptiveness has significant difficulties.

Closing Statement, A Reply to Professor Teachout

This is my closing statement in a 4-part exchange between Professor Teachout and me. The test of great scholarship is that it changes the way people think and the way people live. That is also true for legal academic scholarship. But, for legal academics, perhaps, the greatest sign of scholarly achievement is judicial reliance upon our craftsmanship. By any of these measures, Professor Teachout’s 2009 Cornell Law Review publication, The Anti-Corruption Principle, is a success. One short year after publication, in 2010, Anti-Corruption Principle was relied upon by Justice Stevens in his Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee dissent, just as it was cited, disapprovingly, by Justice Scalia in his concurrence. If that were not enough of an accomplishment, Anti-Corruption Principle has also been cited in practitioners’ Supreme Court briefs, in other federal and state appellate and trial court briefs, and in some thirty academic articles. Finally, Anti-Corruption Principle has entered the public discourse: George Will excoriated Teachout’s article in his nationally syndicated column. Now, that is an achievement. Teachout’s Anti-Corruption Principle is part-and-parcel of the originalist project. It is an attempt to understand the Constitution in light of its text, drafting records, ratification debates, and general late eighteenth century history. Specifically, Teachout makes three related historical and interpretive claims. First, the Framers were “obsessed” with corruption. In other words, preventing or, at least, minimizing corruption was among the Framers’ primary goals, and absent an appreciation of this purpose, one cannot understand either the Constitution’s global architecture or several of its key structural provisions. Second, these separate individual anti-corruption constitutional provisions, working together, give rise to a separate or free-standing structural anti-corruption principle (“ACP”). And, third, the ACP can compete against other constitutional provisions and doctrines, thereby providing originalist foundations for upholding congressional enactments which would otherwise be struck down under competing principles. For example, Teachout points to the Foreign Emoluments Clause (“FEC”), which provides: [N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them [i.e., the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. Teachout suggests that foreign governments which lack loyalties running to the United States, may be analogized to “wealthy corporations,” whose “legal loyalties necessarily exclude patriotism.” Just as Congress, under the FEC, may proscribe (at least certain) federal officers from accepting gifts from foreign governments, Congress, Teachout suggests, may also have a concomitant power under the ACP to proscribe corporate election campaign contributions and spending. The stakes here are quite high: If Teachout is correct, then much First Amendment doctrine and election-law jurisprudence will have to give way (or, at least, be seriously reexamined) in light of the newly discovered (or rediscovered) principle of constitutional interpretation. Indeed, Justice Stevens, and the three dissenters who joined him, used Citizens United as just such an occasion: The dissent sought to recast First Amendment jurisprudence in light of a competing constitutional vision – the Framers’ anti-corruption principle. Other commentators have criticized Teachout in regard to the second step and third step of her analysis. My critique, by contrast, will largely focus on the first step of Teachout’s analysis – her initial historical and textual claims. Teachout’s historical claim is simply wrong: the Founders were not “obsessed” with corruption. Second, Teachout misunderstands the constitutional text giving rise to her purported free-standing anti-corruption principle. Even if one concedes (as, in fact, I do) the existence of a free-standing anti-corruption principle, the scope of that principle extends exclusively to appointed federal offices, not to (state or federal) elective positions. Thus, Teachout’s ACP cannot inform our First Amendment analysis in regard to congressional power over state or federal election processes. In this reply, among other things, I specifically challenge Teachout's rebuttal (and other writings) for engaging in an analysis driven by evidence of the Framers' original intent, rather than by evidence of original public meaning.

The Concept of Law. Cincuenta años

En este trabajo se discuten dos interpretaciones usuales hoy día de la obra de Hart y se trata de evaluar su alcance para la comprensión coherente de este autor y para la teoría positivista del derecho. La primera es la postura que interpreta que el objetivo pretendido por Hart en El concepto de derecho puede verse (a pesar de su orientación analítica y antimetafísica) como un intento de desentrañar la verdadera esencia o naturaleza del derecho, esto es, las características esenciales del concepto que se refiere a él. ¿Es coherente esta interpretación con el compromiso positivista con el empirismo? La segunda cuestión tiene que ver con la relación entre derecho y moral: a pesar de la explícita defensa hartiana de un concepto positivista de derecho, actualmente se afirma que Hart no rechaza la tesis de la conexión necesaria entre derecho y moral. ¿Es posible conciliar esta tesis con el concepto y el método positivistas que Hart supuestamente asume?.

Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid by Louis E. Loeb (review)

Reviewed by: Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid by Louis E. Loeb Kevin Meeker Louis E. Loeb. Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 369. ISBN: 978-0-19-536876-5, Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-536875-8, Paper, $45.00. This book is (almost entirely) a collection of previously published essays by Louis Loeb. The first three essays focus primarily on advancing the general interpretive claim that Descartes’s main epistemological goal is achieving unshakable beliefs. While essays 5–10 address many topics in Humean interpretation, they all contribute in various ways to supporting Loeb’s claim that Hume’s primary epistemological goal is achieving stable beliefs. Essay 12 compares the naturalisms of Hume and Reid. All of the collected essays are excellent. Such excellence is not surprising, for Loeb is an influential interpreter of early modern philosophy, justly renowned for the ingenuity of his readings. Spanning the last three decades, these essays display many fine qualities that have helped make Loeb such a prominent historian. Here I will briefly mention three of these qualities. First, Loeb has remarkable command of the primary historical texts and the secondary literature. This mastery is perhaps best seen in his “What is Worth Preserving in the Kemp Smith Interpretation of Hume?” (essay 9). In addition to providing a detailed exposition of a wide range of texts from Hume and Norman Kemp Smith, Loeb also makes adroit comments about the literature discussing the secondary literature when he addresses the “Canonical Understanding” of Kemp Smith (246–47). Second, Loeb effortlessly integrates historical and contemporary concerns. His “Hume’s Agent-Centered Sentimentalism” (essay 8), for instance, has [End Page 257] an interesting discussion of how Hume’s moral theory might aid contemporary utilitarians (238–44). Moreover, essays 5 (“Integrating Hume’s Accounts of Belief and Justification”) and 10 (“Psychology, Epistemology, and Skepticism in Hume’s Argument about Induction”) fruitfully discuss Hume’s epistemology in light of issues important to the contemporary distinction between internalism and externalism. Third, Loeb’s intuitive knack for isolating important connections amongst various texts and figures allows him to tell a concise story about the evolution of certain philosophical ideas that panoramically covers large portions of the history of philosophy. His “Locke and British Empiricism” (essay 11), which connects epistemological themes in Locke with Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Malebranche, and Reid, among others, is one example. (Because this essay is, as of this writing, still forthcoming, it is the only essay that is not previously published.) Finally, all three of these qualities are prominently on display in “Sextus, Descartes, Hume, and Peirce” (essay 4), which interestingly uses contemporary views about belief (especially as developed by David Velleman) to understand Descartes and Hume “against the backdrop of Sextus and Peirce” (107). To my mind this essay is the best in the book. There are at least two main advantages of collecting these excellent essays into a book. First, the collection allows Loeb to systematically emphasize the similarities between different early modern thinkers in a way that typically strengthens the cumulative case he makes for his readings of these philosophers. Second, the volume permits us to catch a rare glimpse of how an interpreter’s views can change over time. Considering the cumulative effect of the arguments as well as the changes in Loeb’s views also provides us with a great opportunity to reflect critically on many important issues in a fruitful way. The rest of this review will focus on such critical reflections. Let us start with Descartes, as Loeb does. In his introduction to the essays, Loeb helpfully contextualizes his discussions of Descartes. He points out that his paper “Was Descartes Sincere in His Appeal to the Light of Nature?” (not included here) maintains that the arguments Descartes presents are so poor that they “suggest” that “Descartes was insincere in offering his proofs of the existence of God and in appealing to Divine veracity to validate clear and distinct perception” (9; cf. 35). Of course others have likewise contended that Descartes was a dissimulator. But in the first four chapters...

The Immaculate World: Predestination and Passibility in Contemporary Scotism

AbstractThe Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus (ca.1266–1308) taught the puzzling doctrine that had Adam not sinned, the totus Christus would have been immediately glorified. While the Scotist commentarial tradition developed this idea in several surprising ways, most twentieth‐century Scotists rejected it. This article uses a modern philosophy of counterfactual statements to evaluate the interpretive claims of F. X. Pancheri and Juniper Carol, two prominent twentieth‐century Scotists, and presents a new understanding of the traditional Scotist notion that had Adam not sinned, the Word would have become incarnate in impassible flesh.

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo–Indian Trade, 1732–1795 by Robert Paulett (review)

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795. By Robert Paulett. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 264. Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Jon ParmenterRobert Paulett's new volume in the Early American Places series (a collaborative publishing endeavor undertaken by four university presses) makes an important intervention in the growing body of literature tracing transitions in eastern North American Native-settler relations from the colonial era to the early national period. Taking the southeastern deerskin trade as his framework, Paulett analyzes change over time in the spatial sensibilities that governed human relations in that region. Anglo American colonists initially adapted to indigenous concepts of in order to gain access to the deerskin trade. After 1763, British colonial authorities, and later those of the state of Georgia and the United States, found ways to impose their vision of a proper spatial order on the land. Linking ideological changes with physical transformations of the landscape, Paulett's study captures the rich spatial experience of a diverse range of historical actors in what is now the southeastern United States during a crucial period of its history.The book consists of six chapters, organized thematically but progressing in chronological order. Vividly written narrative vignettes open each chapter and prime the reader for the broader interpretive claims offered within. Paulett attends effectively to the intellectual challenge of reconstructing the Indian sense of space (4) while also assessing critically the transformative power of settler spatiality. While the study tracks the evolution of the deerskin trade from its origins in a Nativedominated, messy, and difficult-to-control empire of commerce, through British imperial efforts to better regulate an empire of land, down to a republican American empire of liberty devoted to the exclusion of Native people from their ancestral homelands, Paulett avoids falling into a narrative of inevitable indigenous decline. The author's focus on the originally shared and eventually contested production of in the southeast demonstrates how thousands of discrete human movements shaped the region's history before, during, and after the fundamentally transformative Revolutionary War.Paulett's opening chapter on the mapping of colonial Georgia-a colony founded to serve the interests of British imperial (12), intersects with cutting-edge work on imperialist cartography by demonstrating how colonial projectors' fantasies of controlling gridded Cartesian spaces confronted the competing discourse of indigenous peoples' relational, processual notions of as a series of interconnected points. The author's arguments are sustained by the sources cited, but unfortunately the reproductions of the maps in the text are small and lack the resolution to make an independently convincing visual case. Nevertheless, Paulett paints an effective picture of how sweeping claims to territorial mastery conveyed by early British imperial maps contrasted with colonial traders' actual experience of space; far from reflecting mastery over the landscape, the constricted movements of traders along Native paths generated traders' deep familiarity with only a limited number of places and peoples. Still, the jealousy with which traders guarded their particular, experiential geographical knowledge of the southeast became a flash point of controversy with imperial authorities seeking to rationalize control of revenues from the deerskin trade after 1763, as well as with colonial backcountry planters interested in replacing the town-based commercial economy of the deerskin trade with more intensive cultivation of agricultural commodities by an enslaved African labor force. …

Freedom and Necessity in Marx's Account of Communism

This paper considers whether Marx's views about communism change significantly during his lifetime. According to the ‘standard story’, as Marx got older he dropped the vision of self-realization in labour that he spoke of in his early writings, and adopted a more pessimistic account of labour, where real freedom is achieved outside the working-day, in leisure. Other commentators, however, have argued that there is no pessimistic shift in Marx's thought on this matter. This paper offers a different reading of this debate. It argues that there are two visions of the good life in Marx. However, it suggests that these two visions cannot be understood in terms of a simple shift between a ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx. Rather, it claims that Marx moves between these two visions throughout his writings. In this way, it suggests that Marx's intellectual development on this issue is best understood as an oscillation rather than a shift. Once this interpretive claim is advanced, the paper then moves on to consider some potential causes and implications of Marx's life-long oscillation between two different conceptions of the good life.